An epidemic of untruths

12:00AM BST 12 Apr 2001

WHAT is happening in the foot and mouth outbreak? Yesterday, the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Prof David King, while warning against complacency, said that he was "cautiously optimistic" that the epidemic is now "flattening out".

Obviously everyone must hope that this prognosis, based as it presumably is on all the latest evidence, proves correct. But Labour's blatant attempts to manipulate news about the outbreak for its own political ends are gravely undermining the credibility of anything the Government (of which Keith Vaz is still a member) says on the subject.

With the Commons now in recess, it is becoming increasingly hard to extract figures from Maff to enable outside observers - and, indeed, farmers, who need to know - to judge for themselves what is really happening. At the same time, the level of black propaganda directed mainly against farmers, but also others, has risen to unprecedented levels. When figures are withheld, and media sympathetic to the Government are repeatedly filled with stories clearly planted to deflect criticism of its shortcomings, it does not take a conspiracy theorist to wonder just what is going on.

Two weeks ago, with criticism of the Government mounting, several newspapers were led to believe, by what appeared to be government sources, that the cause of the outbreak had been traced to pigswill from a Chinese restaurant. Later this was denounced by ministers as being not just wrong, but as having racist overtones, but by then, of course, it had served its purpose. Similarly, a few days ago the BBC received leaked details of a dossier of 300 cases of alleged illegal animal movements, apparently being investigated by trading standards officers.

Everything is always alleged, rarely is anything confirmed and often it is later denied. Yesterday's main headline in The Times proclaimed: "Army accuses farmers of infecting their own animals". Below, it quoted Major Lucy Giles, who is part of the army operation in Cumbria, saying that she had been told the police were investigating at least one farmer in connection with these allegations. Within hours, the Ministry of Defence had called the story "totally misleading" and made clear that "the Army has certainly not accused farmers of malpractice". Senior military men are furious to find the Forces used in this way.

Ever since Downing Street took charge of the crisis, Labour has been looking for scapegoats for its own inadequacies in the fight against foot and mouth; farmers, Chinese restaurateurs, supermarkets, whoever fits the bill that day, gets a bucket of unattributable pigswill thrown over them by one spin doctor or another. Tony Blair may have postponed the election date for a month, but he has not postponed the electioneering.

Nor has Labour's handling of the statistics been much better. Since foot and mouth was first identified in February, there has been concern over the way in which Maff has presented these. Two weeks ago, it stopped publishing the number of farms judged to be dangerous contacts for confirmed cases of the disease, and whose livestock would therefore also have to be slaughtered. Without this figure, the total of all farms affected by the epidemic was conveniently obscured, just as opposition to Maff's mass culling tactics was building up.

This week, Maff has gone even further. No figures are now being produced on the number of animals authorised for slaughter, slaughtered, disposed of, awaiting slaughter or awaiting disposal. Maff says these figures were becoming inaccurate (which does not say much for its efficiency) and that, anyway, it is too busy in the field to give them out at the moment. Once again, however, a glance at the last ones it did produce shows just how embarrassing they had become. The number of animals awaiting disposal, for instance, had nearly doubled in a week, despite the Army's best efforts.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of all this is that Labour appears incapable of grasping just how counter-productive its efforts to baffle and mislead us have become. As a result, we do not know whether yesterday's foot and mouth news really was promising. In Downing Street, they cannot seem to understand that, when one can no longer be sure whom or what to believe, most people's natural instinct is to believe the worst.